Experts: Christmas trees a serious fire danger

Researchers demonstrate dangers after family dies due to tree fire

There have been warnings before about the potential dangers of Christmas trees being left up too long, but those warnings bear repeating after learning that a fire that destroyed an Annapolis mansion, killing two adults and their four grandchildren, was started by a Christmas tree. George Lettis has more on a sobering demonstration.

There have been warnings before about the potential dangers of Christmas trees being left up too long, but those warnings bear repeating after learning that a fire that destroyed an Annapolis mansion, killing two adults and their four grandchildren, was started by a Christmas tree.

Fire protection experts at the University of Maryland said they weren't surprised a Christmas tree caused a destructive fire at a house that big, and they're not surprised it happened in late January.

Experts held a demonstration Wednesday that showed it takes less than a minute for a dry Christmas tree to become an inferno. Fire protection officials used a much smaller tree than the one investigators said burned in the mansion.

"The peak energy release rate that we have there is equivalent to maybe an 8- or 10-foot pool of just gasoline that I lit on fire, and that's for just your standard size Christmas tree," said UMd. fire protection researcher Isaac Leventon.

Researchers said the 16,000-square-foot Annapolis mansion, despite its size, was no match for a dry and burning 15-foot pine.

"What makes a Christmas tree fire more dangerous than, let's say, I just light a chair or waste basket on fire is how quickly they can grow and how large they are going to get," Leventon said. "With a fire that's going to be that large, you have a much higher change of starting to light up other things around the home that might burn with it."

Statistics show most Christmas tree fires don't happen around the holidays but instead weeks later.

"People have said, 'Well, I like the tree. I don't want to take it out. I'll leave it here for a while.' And it continues to dry out more and more, and so throughout January, you see this uptick of more and more Christmas tree fires that are happening," Leventon said.

The Annapolis waterfront mansion was built in 2005, four years before Anne Arundel County required sprinklers in newly built homes. University of Maryland's Dr. Jim Milke said sprinklers could have saved lives, but there's no guarantee.

"(They could have) likely limited that fire to that initial area, to that great room, and kept the fire from spreading very much beyond that would have been the hope," Milke said. "Now, whether that would've been in time for the family is of course another question and worth some study, I think."Experts also said an artificial tree wouldn't remove those risks, but it could reduce them.